Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —so that we penetrate the D-fences, send or receive (i GOT A NEW BOYFRIEND, Mir’s message came to me, ONLY IT’S BEEN GOING A LONG TIME, HE’S AN ACCOUNTANT) yes, when instead we should be going round and round; and then when we should be sending, receiving, we instead go round and round precipitating a void where the center was. Am I right?

  So you came here—well, once a week—started your own brand of social work, more entertaining therefore more valuable than most, at this retirement complex, and it’s how I now have all to myself that family window though you’re almost missing from it, where I see your grandfather with a pistol on the mantel unbending two or three times a year to sing, ‘Tut on your old gray bonnet / With the blue ribbons on it / And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," almost missing but not quite missing because here you were, singing briefly for a lively audience of cons, a song I’d never heard, and if I hadn’t they hadn’t, though blue ribbon even I a city guy (even now in a multiple dwelling in the country occupied by mainly city guys) know is first prize they pin on a horse at a horse show. Sixty, eighty thousand miles traveled, two or three times round the earth, and still a town boy with a family, though we have pianos in the City too, though none in Miriam’s or my home though I hear the conductor bought my sister a blond-wood upright which no one ever touches, she told me, and you don’t get a man like your grandpa to sing unless he’s accompanied, think who might pass by and look in the window: Foley a generation later, if I broke out—and more interested in how you fit into that window your old white Caddy you bought to give to your daughter in Wash-inton, a grand gesture to be sure at nine miles to the gallon but any guy here could dig it—blue-ribbon horsepower and I’m glad she took your gift in good humor (I sense you’d been unsure): you say the Chilean has a brother in Washington—now that I didn’t know but Efrain (who would never come back to visit) wrote asking if that dealer-duck’s-ass-into-a-ponytail type guy had been back to visit, he’d run into Efrain near Penn Station and asked what he knew about the murder of the wife of a South American newspaper publisher ten, fifteen years ago and had he been in Philadelphia the other day, the economist’s brother was there for some opera singer’s recital—and Efrain is scared—mainly by the guy, not his information, though he would not admit it—but what do they stick your daughter for insurance, she’s under twenty-five, maybe my information is old. But why be so damn ready for the future, it’s here, to recall a peculiar point about future you dropped which nobody but me picked up on, so that everybody but me nodded thoughtfully, you know? But a touch of old-fashioned class, give or take a tender valve or two, Jim-Daddy, might even get her an interesting friend or two in the nation’s capital. I wrote letters to the editor once upon a time on the subject of Australia, etcetera, but also of having some good old-fashioned taste in the design and beauty of the automobiles you choose to get into, and I dreamed of seeing an article in the paper with my name on it and of taking Miriam up and down the Hudson River in a hired helicopter, so I must have been looking forward to that corner of your aforementioned window where you can be seen rising off a Manhattan pier in the middle of the day in transit to JFK jet but for the moment watching out the window some cops on the pier, a TV crew, a tugboat, and a diver just coming up the ladder onto the pier in his black rubber suit, TV news possibly but no network sign in evidence and something else wrong with that, you looked back down there as long as you could but—and I, too, sense something in that scene familiar (to you, I mean). Or was it, Jim, that you said sometimes you leave people where they are. ("Very funny," said Efrain, the only one of us then soon to be paroled.) To which I’d add leave some of your stories where they are and don’t look back too close, like at the man and woman upside down in seat-belt harness the blood dry on their alert faces but the car wheels still spinning, I don’t pretend to know where you were, it must have been up in the high magnetic mountains where the air friction’s less (smile), although I grant it occurred to me more than once because Mir’ liked to drive fast, an accident, a fatal accident—well, close the window, if you like—a dual fatality they would have said, leaving us where we were. In time. Oh say her name, Jim, I say her. They can’t hang me for that. Not in the state I’m in (smile) for which the future for all I know may already have developed colloid-boosters to phase out imbalances such as what inclined us two. I mean you and me, since there was little hope for my Miriam to take control of her life. Her father had boxed her in, while only I called her "Mir’."

  Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

  That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!"—because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him—freeze—cut—frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on—no, it’s not raining outside, I’m telling a true story—and both of us knowing at the same instant why of course the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

  Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

  R. M
. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that—get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission not to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory . . . no, the water fountain—but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the P.M. after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise—so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime—Yeah, hit oil, man—Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong?—silence, and a passing patrolman called Wrong!, same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?

  Meanwhile dozens of barrels of flour were rolled into the street and the heads broken open and a kid named James was throwing barrels of flour out into the street from an upper story calling, "Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel," which was what it should have been selling at perhaps, and the constabulary could do nothing with the anger of the mob which was organized from its inception north of City Hall at the present site and it was the first riot in "your history," the lady told us, where the poor ripped off the property of the rich and a New York paper called it the beginning of the French Revolution, did anyone know what the French Revolution was—no one in this junior high class did, and one of the drivers asked who the George Washington Bridge had been named after and a black kid said, Martha’s man. Anyway here was the Flour Riot of 1837, never forgot it, Jim, so what if the building had changed, and it was inflation panic, Ruth said, did we know what inflation was? the voice held us, not the words which is often the case with colloid communication, prices going up, what do you do when the landlord hits you for twice what your pad is worth like me, said Ruth M. Heard, because you see, rent went right up with flour in 1836-37, right? (Right!) and why was that (why the bakers, a man’s voice called, owned all the real estate) and as Ruth called out these questions, three older ladies with small hats came out at the door of a restaurant to smile, and I said, We got rent control now. Ruth called, Well what about the poor landlord, you watch, the City ups his property taxes and you and your family go on paying peanuts for your apartment; I said You’re taking both sides—her voice came at you deepened, like harsh pellets whipping through the sunlight. I reached for Miriam’s hand, she was over by a vendor with Gonzales buying a hot dog, the cost of flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel. Ruth asked what was a monopoly, one of our drivers as stocky as a snatch-and-press fanatic here on the farm cut in and gave a teacher-type answer that sounded English to me until she told him compassion was death and he could shut up now and the point was the flour people had made flour and wheat scarce by hiding them in the warehouse till the price went up: see the flour in the streets, our substitute called, and our twofold divided group on the sidewalk had been joined by slow-moving late-lunchtime people and messengers one with an enlarged head, one not, and anybody you want to think of was looking up at James’s windows. And as the flour and sacks of wheat came down, rent went up, now how do you figure that, think of what the street looked like! Think of life outside.

  But we were back in the vans now—Jim, I’ve been over every square foot of that trip in here, I have the map, I have the pictures of old New York—and we were headed to the fish market to see historic Coenties Slip with the little houses that looked like they might fall down, which was where the rioters wound up smashing windows and doors and ten more barrels emptied. But at this point, Jim, our substitute reintroduced one of her wealthy Americans, the strong one, as the man who was going to buy us hamburgers with the works at three o’clock and I don’t know how many hamburgers and sodas went down, this is 1958, 1959, but I was the only one who could tell without counting hamburgers and sodas that little Gonzales and Miriam had been missing since the last stop and I figured Gonzalez knew what he was doing if Miriam didn’t, for this was only junior high and Gonzalez went everywhere with his father and often alone to do with his father’s lamp business. It was irresponsible of me and of Ruth Heard not to, respectively, do something and know about the two absentees, but when we arrived back at the school in our vans there was High Kool making his moves and dunking a few, and the roughest girl in the class, Louise, laughed at something Ruth said and looked over her shoulder and caught me looking at her and I gave her the grin, and a thought came in one eye and out the other—and no Gonzalez though there was an explanation, little G. had had a business appointment several blocks uptown and Miriam accompanied him, an errand for his father. Ruth M. Heard kept me or I her talking by the playground fence and she was telling how she had heard about the brain drain from Britain and had decided to come over in case any rubbed off on her, and how she was Jewish and so was New York which I was ready to believe though not that this small blue-eyed rambunctious woman with her accent could be Jewish. She said, You’re ahead of the others, I suspect way ahea
d—but how old are you? What’s going to happen to you? Two teachers, two men, had come down the steps with a cop, it was late, they seemed to be approaching but this was the time of day and really they were waiting, and Ruth M. Heard said, Here comes trouble, I could walk her home another time, but I had said nothing about walking her home, Jim.

  "You were thinking it," you reply, picking up what I would have said had I not known you would pick it up.

  Yes, and there I stood at the playground fence, it had begun to rain and High Kool stopped short with the ball hanging from one hand and looked upward. I felt the city, this block and the few other blocks I knew well, south going down to Fourteenth and east to the river, you know the area I know, and while my parents’ building and others like it still stand, now being occupied by, as my father used to say, "off-islanders" (Hispanics) but I happen to know also by gypsies from New Jersey via Rumania, and rocked by bongo drops (suddenly a drum is ther^, two drums, and guys have cut out to play them) and opened here and there by dust-choking construction sites like everywhere else in the city where kids play and imagine shortcuts through to other Arab- and Australian-financed construction sites leading mayhap to a brand-new disaster area where their own building was this morning, which may be what happened to Juan’s little brother like Efrafn who passed into the very heart of pickpocket land where you get the opposite, ungraphable, unpredictable, and anti-pickpocket warp where instead of your pocket being picked, valuable stuff comes into your pocket.

  And suddenly, retreating from me to face the music for the first of many times and she could care less, Ruth M. Heard left me at the fence dreaming of speaking, starting somewhere between ahead of myself and retarded— speaking of what then I did not know, thinking nonetheless of, well mostly bullshit, Jim, but also of Ruth M. Heard’s father, who I thought might have died, yes hit by a bullet while speaking his mind on some great current event, and there beside me was Miriam looking over her shoulder telling me our substitute was in a shouting match down there (her eyes slightly wall-eyed like some thought came back to me seeing me but . . . you know).